It’s gotten to the point that my Itunes data are taking up way too much space on my hard drive and I’m considering moving them to external storage.
Any advice on how I can or should go about doing this?
How do I move my existing data from the hard drive to the external drive?
How do I set it up so that when the external drive is attached that new Itunes data goes straight to the external drive?
If the external drive is not attached, how do I handle new data? Is there an easy way to keep it temporarily on the hard drive and automatically ship it to the external the next time it’s plugged in?
I currently have an external back up storage device which takes up both USB ports. Are there storage devices that wouldn’t use both? Because otherwise I don’t know how I would snc my Ipod.
Should I get a third external storage device to be the back up for the Itunes data? How would I do that?
Would there be a way to use my current external storage device to be both my hard drive back up and also my Itunes data location? Of course that would mean I still wouldn’t have an Itunes backup.
iTunes really wants your music to live on your machine. It really does. And if you try to do otherwise, you will feel the pain as you buck the system.
I did this for two years, using my NAS as my iTunes home. All you need to do is tell iTunes not to copy music to your computer when you add it to your library.
The problems start to creep in when the NAS is not available. In addition, editing metadata gets a little dicey when dealing with a different filesystem that might not match that of your machine.
I prefer to keep my NAS read-only to prevent disasters from the kids and rogue viruses. A year or so ago, Apple released a new version of iTunes that failed miserably with some strange error code (e.g. “iTunes failed with error code -51”).
I discovered that when I made the NAS writable this problem went away.
A couple of months later, in a new release, this problem disappeared completely and I was able to use a read-only NAS again. None of this was documented by Apple.
Prepare yourself for an uphill battle.
That said, it is possible. I did this for two years and it worked. Now that I have more space I prefer to keep the originals on the NAS and keep a local copy for convenience and speed.
Actually, just getting the library to live on a non-internal drive is pretty easy. Go to the “Advanced” tab of iTunes Preferences, and click the “Change…” button next to the music folder location. Once it’s changed, select Library->Consolidate Library on the File menu to complete the move. The library will work just fine on the external/network drive.
Problems will arise if you want to do either of two common extensions to this (and it looks like you do): (a) use a drive that isn’t always available, and/or (b) share this library with multiple computers.
(a) is annoying, but pretty easy to work around if you can connect all the devices at once. If you forget and launch iTunes without the library available, it will ask if you want to make a new one – just cancel at that point.
(b) is the stuff of nightmares.
As for needing more USB ports than you presently have, that’s what USB hubs are for. You can get cheap, powered (you want powered, generally) ones for $15 or so.
You are saying “data” but your OP is about iTunes, so I’m going to assume you mean musical data only.
This is what I did. There’s another method from within iTunes that someone mentioned, and I’ll discuss that later. This is my method, and works well for me:
Copy your entire “Music” folder (located in YourComputer/Users/YourUsername) to the external drive by dragging it there.
Now, this is important, make sure that the external music folder was copied properly and all your files are there - maybe check some of the folder names and the size of the entire main folder. Once you are sure, move the old music folder on the internal harddrive to the trash.
Click on the new music folder on your external, and select from the menubar File>Make Alias. A copy of the Music folder will appear with a little arrow on it signifiying that it’s an alias, which is just a pointer to the real file. Drag this alias to the place where your old internal music folder used to be. Make sure the name of the alias is “Music” and not “Music alias”. Delete the alias on the external.
Now when iTunes looks for the music folder on the internal drive, it will think that the external music folder is what it’s looking for.
You can do the same thing with iPhoto and the Pictures folder.
You mean music files? You can just make a temporary music files folder and then drag the music files into itunes at a later time when you have the external connected. If you are importing CDs you might want to wait til you have the external available as itunes likes to convert the files. You could though copy the CD to the harddrive if you really wanted to, but it would take up more space (~600MB) as the original files than as converted mp3s.
The majority only take up one. I’ve never heard of any device except for video converters which take up more than one USB. You can also get externals that use the firewire port, if you have one. Also, you can buy a USB expander - it turns one USB port into several.
If you are running out of space on your original, or if you are troubled by both USB ports being taken up, it’s a good idea. You just buy it and plug it in. What questions do you have about that?
It depends on your particular method of backup. If the backup takes over an entire harddrive than you couldn’t use one device for both. But many backup programs, including Apple’s own Time Machine, can partition part of the drive for the backup and leave the rest free for data.
I’m not sure whether or not it will care that some of your data is on the external drive. It might be able to back up this data too. Let us know which backup method you are using and someone will be able to figure it out. It’s really very dependent on which backup method you are using though.
I tried this and it “forgot” where a lot of my music files were. Little exclamation points appeared next to songs that it didn’t know where they were any more. Granted, I could click on the song, and tell it where it was, but this gets very tiring when you have thousands of songs. You could just reimport them but then you lose metadata.
It’s possible this is a problem that has been solved on newer macs. But I find it’s easier and more trouble free to just make an alias of the folder.